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Saturday, February 1, 2014

Generic Ambiguity – playing with audience expectations in The Maltese Falcon

The Maltese Falcon provides an interesting case study for
genre analysis, as it is credited with a role in catalyzing the era of Film Noir
and as the film itself uses, plays with, and resists genre-based audience expectations.

It is worth noting that this film was seminal in
establishing both Bogart and Huston’s careers. Audiences were not familiar with
either of them when this film was released in 1941, less than 2 months prior to
the bombing of Pearl Harbor and engagement of the US in World War II.A retrospective understanding of eminent
historical events and of the legacy of Bogart’s career playing a litany of
variations on Sam Spade affect a modern viewer’s engagement with this text in a
way impossible for its contemporary audience to chew on. The film is now, in several ways representative of a style (and arguably a genre) that was not yet established upon its release.

The film opens under the pretext of a detective mystery, but
following the generic shift of the novel on which it is based, the hero of this
mystery is flawed and proletariat, speaking in jargon and functioning under a
fallen pretense of the society in which he works.Prior to this film, and even in previous film
adaptations of the same novel, the hero and his worldview were significantly
softened and romanticized.Huston’s
achievement here may have been in finding a way to cinematically express the
pessimistic realism of hard-boiled writers while avoiding conflict with censors
or the Hayes Code, and establishing a pattern for all of Film Noir to follow. In some ways he cinematically introduced, what Schrader termed the "narcissistic, defeatist code"[1]of protagonists created by Hard Boiled writers like Dashiell Hammett.

The ultimate nature of the film remains ambiguous
throughout, as romantic elements struggle against gritty pessimism.The ambiguity is ultimately tied up in the
mystery of Brigid O’Shaughnessy’s compulsive lies and in uncertainty to how Sam
Spade will ultimately respond to her.In
establishing the plot and mystery over the course of the film, several possible
solutions are proposed, each of which, if “proven” would create parameters of a
given moral code for the film, and thus define it’s genre quite differently.Each proposition varies based on the level of
romanticism versusrealism in the characters of Sam and Brigid as well as in
the amount of corruption revealed in each character.

If Brigid’s initial lie about her "sister" had been true, the
film could have been a straightforward crime drama with a heavy dose of innocuous
romantic involvement. "Good guys" and "Bad Guys" would have been easy to identify and categorize. But each time
Spade resists believing her façade and her character becomes increasingly
morally dubious, the implications for the moral order of the entire film are
that its reality becomes increasingly dark, dangerous, and pessimistic.The introduction of the possibility that Sam
will engage in behavior as corrupt and self-serving as that of Brigid or the
more overt criminals Kasper, Joel, or Wilmer, creates a terrific range of
possible moral orders for the film, within the film.

The film concluded in perhaps the perfect place to catalyze
the Film Noir movement.Brigid was
revealed as an intractable black widow type femme fatale, but Sam’s actions
cast him instead as quintessentially “hard-boiled.” Ultimately he is a lone wolf – resistant to
the allure of Brigid’s dangerous romanticism; a little bit lawless, but
fundamentally incorruptible at some limit.

This moral order, where climactically the protagonist can be
trusted to resist corruption, but every other character (and the world of the
film at large) is suspect, seems like the perfect signature for nascent Film
Noir.

The Maltese Falcon is absent many of the more visual,
semantic elements usually attributed to Noir films.Its lighting in particular is even and
unexpressive, but in syntactic elements, many of the structures required for
Noir to take off were strongly introduced here; particularly the tension
between pessimistic realism and romanticism and the sympathetic portrayal of
the protagonist’s narcissistic pessimism and acceptance of his flaws as benign in relation
to those of others. (A palatable entry of the anti-hero?)

It seems that the moral order of the universe of the film is
an additional syntactic element that may be used to identify genre, as it
certainly relates to the audience’s expectations of any given text.Altman said that “the audience for a genre
film is sufficiently committed to generic values to tolerate and even enjoy in
genre films capricious, violent, or licentious behavior which they might
disapprove of in real life.” [2]This would seem to be because the audience
has an acceptance and expectation for a moral order in the universe of a given
genre’s reality that they accept is different from that of their reality.If, however, an audience came to a film text
prepared to accept a given moral order and were then presented or affronted
with a contrary one (as might have occurred in the Maltese Falcon had Sam
ultimately proved corruptible), it would likely leave the audience considerably
unsettled.

That potential for unease has certainly been exploited
intentionally in more recent times, but in 1941 the gritty pessimism of Sam
Spade may have been just enough Noir to be widely acclaimed and accepted and to
jumpstart a decade of deep darkness and high style. The counter-cultural acceptance of this defeatist morality works, according to Altman, "When we are in the world, we follow its rule; when we enter into a genre film, all our decisions are self-consciously modified to support a different kind of satisfaction." The Maltese Falcon appears to have introduced, in large measure, the "satisfaction" possible in Film Noir, and with it's unexpected commercial success, created a "world" and a moral order that audiences were willing to re-enter repeatedly, embracing its "overtly counter-cultural acts" in order to experience the kind of satisfaction that came from watching Sam Spade soundly reject romanticism, living by the moral order of a "narcissistic, defeatist code".